BOOKS & ARTS
play is so fidgety and inconclusive that the
reader is left panting for a cup of cocoa.
Goldstein is a man for the microscope
rather than the telescope. His readers are
given such close and tiny details that the big
vision is lost. There is nothing interesting in
Eliot’s decision to wear black tie at a dinner
of Lady Rothermere’s or in the stewed pears
offered to Lawrence for breakfast. Inordi-
nate quotation from his subjects’ letters and
diaries makes for choppy, disjointed read-
ing and peppers Goldstein’s pages with too
many inverted commas. He seems remote
in his understanding of Woolf as a woman,
and at his most sympathetic in writing of
Forster’s doubts and anxiety. Yet Gold-
stein’s account of Kangaroo will be new
and appetising to most readers. If only he
had written more about this half-forgotten
novel, and less about people’s ailments and
squabbles.
He puts Eliot, Lawrence and Woolf, if
not so much Forster, into a mental land-
scape of postwar trauma. The scale of death
from the war of 1914–18 and the subsequent
influenza epidemic left its survivors griev-
ing and haunted: memories of the past were
encased in everybody’s present thoughts.
Goldstein reiterates:
‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, Kangaroo and
The Waste Land all declared the glaring con-
tradiction of 1922: the war was over, but had
not ended.This is too trite a theme to bear the weight of
significance that is piled on it in The World
Broke in Two.
The title is one of the best points in
Goldstein’s book. ‘The world broke in two
in 1922 or thereabouts,’ Willa Cather wrote
in 1936 of the year when Joyce published
Ulysses and Eliot The Waste Land. The
phrase looks catchy on the book cover, but
Goldstein is ungrateful to Cather. In the
modernist ascendancy of 1922, ‘the form of
storytelling she prized, and excelled at, was
no longer of signal importance’, he says on
the first page of his book. ‘She was the relic
of an old literature, the value of which had
not been preserved against the new litera-
ture that Joyce and Eliot represented.’
This is the New York literary publiti-
cian talking like a commodity dealer tak-
ing a short-term position. Cather’s novel of
1922, One of Ours, is a lopsided, risk-taking
triumph with flaws that increase its fascina-
tion: it would be acclaimed for its war writ-
ing if she had been a man. Her next novel,
A Lost Lady (1923) is a marvel of emotion-
al richness: Madame Bovary set in a small
American community called Sweet Water;
little known in England, but unforgetta-
ble to anyone who has read it. Both novels
leave A Passage to India bowled middle-
stump. Goldstein’s dismissal of Cather as
démodée gives an early warning of what is
wrong with his over-researched, unreflec-
tive and lustreless book.
Learning to talk
Harry Ritchie
How Language Began: The Story of
Humanity’s Greatest Invention
by Daniel L. Everett
Profile, £25, pp. 384One of the great achievements of science is
that so many of its branches, from astron-
omy to zoology, have been blessed by such
great popularisers — your Attenboroughs,
your Sagans, your Dawkinses. Alas, there is
one inglorious exception to this marvellous
rule — linguistics. A discipline that has pro-
duced enormous and enormously important
advances over the last century — but not
one linguist who has managed to tell the rest
of the world about them. Steven Pinker did
have a bestseller with The Language Instinct,
but he was moonlighting from his day job in
neuropsychology.
Linguistics does have one world-class
intellectual celebrity, but Noam Chomsky
is celebrated mainly for his radical politics,
and he has done his very best to make his
work on language as arcane and incompre-
hensible as string theory.
The world outside linguistics depart-ments remains unaware of it,
but Chomsky’s crazed theo-
ries — about humans’ innate
language-learning devices and
the deep structure of a univer-
sal grammar that creates all
languages — have been com-
prehensively disproved. The
new orthodoxy is the empirical
school of cognitive linguistics,
and Daniel Everett is its star
pupil — and the one thinker
with the credentials and ambi-
tion to try to reach the general
public.
Here, Everett takes on one
of Chomsky’s daftest claims —
that the innate neural gizmo
which makes us able to talk
didn’t evolve gradually but just
turned up, created by accident,
by some genetic mutation that
miraculously gave us brains
wired for words. Chomsky esti-
mates that this fluke happened
about 50,000 years ago... when
rock art and cave paintings also
began to appear. And cue the
Twilight Zone theme tune.
Complete nonsense, of
course. There is no innate lin-
guistic machinery in our brains,
there was no magical quirk in
our DNA that gave us a lan-
guage-learning machine, and it
did not all happen 50,000 years
ago.
This is now so universally
accepted that Everett doesn’t have to spend
much time debunking what is obviously a
preposterous theory. Instead, he can con-
centrate on the alternative explanation —
that language developed slowly, at proper
evolutionary pace, not jumping into com-
plete existence all of a sudden, just as the
first giraffe didn’t appear out of nowhere to
the surprise of the rest of the short-necked
herd.
Giving language enough time to evolve
means that it must have started much fur-
ther back than a mere 50 millennia ago.
About 1.9 million years further back, Ever-
ett estimates. Since we, homo sapiens, turned
up only 200,000 years ago, this means that
it wasn’t us who invented language but an
ancestor species — homo erectus.
Like us, homo erectus emerged in Africa
and, like us, they soon spread far and wide
— throughout Europe, China and Indone-
sia. They were smaller than us, and their
brains were smaller than ours, but not that
much smaller, and the speed and extent of
their roaming indicates some level of col-
lective organisation — and communication.
The archaeological record, however, is
scant: a carved seashell, some sharpened
stones that formed the most basic of tool-
kits, and the most amusing item in archae-Our hero, homo erectusBRIDGEMAN IMAGES